Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment: Unsettlement and the Nonhuman in Australian Ecofiction

Fetherston, Rachel

This book explores how contemporary Australian ecofiction interrogates and challenges settler-colonial conceptions of nature and the nonhuman through a close-reading of nine Australian eco-novels. Fetherston's reading reveals the representation of the nonhuman in different contexts and the ability of fiction to destabilise settler claims on Australian land and the nonhuman. Texts covered include a combination of texts by First Nations authors, non-Indigenous Anglo-Celtic Australian authors writing within a settler-colonial literary tradition, and non-Indigenous Australian authors whose novels reflect diasporic literary practices. Fetherston argues that Australian ecofiction authors have established over the last decade a postcolonising eco-literary framework that connects the concepts of nonhuman agency and more-than human relationality with the notion of unsettlement, or unsettled belonging, in the context of the climate crisis. 

Details

Published by: Palgrave Macmillan

Publication Date: 2025-11-16

Format: Hardcover

ISBN-13: 9783032044655

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-032-04466-2

Dimensions: 210cm x148cm

Pages: 229